A wistful coming-of-age story with a haunting twist about four friends who spend their summer learning to become invisible—but disappearing comes at a cost.
THESE BODIES BETWEEN US
by Sarah Van Name
Delacorte, March 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
Four girls. Four girls skating home, both sides of the road, fearless. Four girls at the mouth of an infinite ocean, sugared and salted with sand and seawater, the tide licking their sunburned feet.
This summer, they’re going to disappear.
For seventeen-year-old Callie and her best friends Talia and Cleo, every summer in their small North Carolina beach town is as steady as the tides. But this year, Cleo has invited enigmatic new girl Polly to join them, creating waves in their familiar friendship. And Cleo has an idea, gleaned from private YouTube videos and hidden message boards: they’re going to learn how to make themselves invisible.
Callie thinks it’s a ridiculous, impossible plan. But the other girls are intoxicated by the thought of disappearing, even temporarily—from bad boyfriends, from overbearing families, from the confusing, uncomfortable reality of having a body altogether. And, miraculously, it works.
Yet as the girls revel in their reckless new freedom, they realize it’s getting harder to come back to themselves…and do they even want to?
“A lusciously crafted and achingly poignant story about girlhood with a haunting twist that readers will savor. You won’t soon forget it.” —Kathleen Glasgow, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces
“Spellbinding…Readers might be tempted to disappear alongside this kaleidoscopic foursome.” —K.L. Walther, New York Times bestselling author of The Summer of Broken Rules
“A gorgeous, wistful meditation on the pleasure and pain of adolescent girlhood, friendship, and the magic of summer.” —Dahlia Adler, author of Cool for the Summer
Sarah Van Name grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina and now lives and works in Durham with her family and dog. She is the author of two previous young adult novels, The Goodbye Summer (2019, a Junior Library Guild pick) and Any Place But Here (2021).
THE EYES AND THE IMPOSSIBLE
SIMON SORT OF SAYS
BREAK TO YOU
Meet Parker Ronald, captain of the Hall Monitors. Not every school has them, but Wood Intermediate does, at least for one more week.
Amélie Coeur has never known what it truly means to be happy.
Johannes, a free dog, lives in an urban park by the sea. His job is to be the Eyes—to see everything that happens within the park and report back to the park’s elders, three ancient Bison. His friends—a seagull, a raccoon, a squirrel, and a pelican—work with him as the Assistant Eyes, observing the humans and other animals who share the park and making sure the Equilibrium is in balance. But changes are afoot. More humans, including Trouble Travelers, arrive in the park. A new building, containing mysterious and hypnotic rectangles, goes up. And then there are the goats—an actual boatload of goats—who appear, along with a shocking revelation that changes Johannes’s view of the world. A story about friendship, beauty, liberation, and running very, very fast, THE EYES AND THE IMPOSSIBLE will make readers of all ages see the world around them in a wholly new way.